French crave new revolution

Country leads EU neighbours as 53% claim they would overthrow the capitalist system

MORE than half of French people want to see the overthrow of capitalist economics.

This compares to and average of 31% in other EU nations.

The figures were collected by poll group TNS-Sofres in a survey that involved 4,500 people from Sweden, France, Spain, Britain and Germany.

53% of French people said they wanted to see a profound change to the capitalist system.

A similar percentage in other EU nations merely wanted to see ‘partial’ change, something desired by only 38% of the French.

The study was published as a meeting entitled New World, New Capitalism took place in Paris today with President Nicolas Sarkozy, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and German Chancellor Angela Merkel all attending.

Across Europe only 7% of those interviewed believed there would be any substantial reform to the world economic system and 35% said there would be none at all.

Just over half of those interviewed said the level of state intervention in economics was too weak. The figure was 59% in France, compared to 42% in Britain.

When asked about the level of international cooperation in confronting the economic problems, 37% of French said this should be at a European level, compared to 15% of Britons (29% of Britons would like to see G20 nations work together, while 21% believed nations should sort themselves out alone).